Friday, March 17, 2017

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Oral tradition of Jewish literature

The reason that Talmud is known as Torah she-b’al-peh meaning
Oral Torah, is because up until the time of Rabbi Judah the Prince, it was
transmitted orally.Individual students
might make written notes; that was permitted as a reminder.(Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 6b, including
Rashi’s note.)But study and usage were
oral, either in class or in action in the courtroom.

The components of Talmud are two: Mishnah, the post-Torah records
of information needed to run Jewish culture; and Gemara, supplemental material
from oral discussions and courtroom decisions.There are two sets of Gemara, one developed in Babylonia and the other
developed in the Holy Land.

The Mishnah plus Gemara from the Holy Land is called
Jerusalem Talmud.Thereare 1700 numbered pages in the classic
edition.

The Mishnah plus Gemara from Babylonia is called Babylonian
Talmud.There are 2700 numbered pages in
the classic edition.

You’re going to object that Talmud breaks the rule as an
oral communication because it is lengthy.But don’t forget the fact that written material tends to be linearly
organized, such as by subject.Talmud is
hard for most people to understand because its organization is
associative.The rule of association is
personal to the people who transmitted it and relates to the particular subject
under discussion, how the discussion got started, and the purpose for
discussing it.

Everybody who tries to understand Talmud has to put in a lot
of work.None of them were there when
the discussion got started, some of them don’t live in a subculture which applies
Talmud, and some people take up the study without a solid grasp on the
underpinnings of Talmud in Torah and Mishnah.Plus there’s a habit of trying to relate to it through translations instead
of primary documents.

Now you’re going to object that Gemara is a commentary.The answer is, it’s an in-culture commentary,
developed specifically to clarify Mishnah, which is a commentary itself.

Mishnah developed specifically to clarify the law in Torah,
and to supplement it since experience in the courtroom showed that the Torah had
gaps of information needed to decide court cases and teach courtroom procedure.

Those gaps occurred because Torah itself was an oral
communication.Oral communications
suffer from problems with human memory; we easily forget what we don’t use on a
regular basis.Gd, being omniscient,
would have known better than to try and tell the Israelites everything they
would need to know in future millennia, because they would have forgotten what
they didn’t use and didn’t understand, and they would have to recreate it
anyway once they did need it.Telling
them that it was illegal to start a car on Shabbat would never have survived
the millennia between establishment of Shabbat and invention of the car.Even in writing – remember those lost Greek
works? – it might have disappeared or – remember the Bamian statues? – been
destroyed.

Torah law is much shorter and simpler than Talmud, but it
has the gaps of information typical of orally transmitted material, and it also
has an associative organization, the rule for which we do not know because the
rule was not recorded at the time or passed along.(I’ll take a guess at it at the end of this
blog based on the statement of a rabbi which he made in audio lectures on
Talmud.)

There are two reasons why things don’t get recorded.One is that nobody records great secrets
because they can get into unauthorized hands through carelessness or deliberate
stealing.The other reason is that nobody
records things that are common knowledge.Nobody imagines that they might be forgotten.

Things that were common knowledge, when the ancestors of the
Jews began using Torah, dropped out of communications because they need not be
said.Once they dropped out of
communications, it was a matter of time until they dropped out of memory.When a case came into court where such
information would have been useful, it was gone.Then the court had to create a ruling that
supplemented whatever they knew.Torah
explicitly permits this in Deuteronomy 17:8-12.

Torah has gaps and an associative structure.Because it is like Talmud in this way, I believe
that its origin is oral, not written. But wait, there's more.